Probably my favorite modernish rom com is Say Anything. A big part of what's great about the film is that writer/director Cameron Crowe manages to create a plot in which the young lead characters, Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack) and Diane Court (Ione Skye), are not assholes. Crowe does this in large part by turning Diane's father Jim (John Mahoney) into the film's main antagonist. It's Jim who keeps the lovers apart; it's Jim who provides the barrier to their love. As a result, Lloyd doesn't have to cheat on Diane, and Diane doesn't have to keep mooning after him even though he treats her like crap. You can fall in love with both of them without feeling dirty—which, surely, is the entire point of a romantic comedy.

On the one hand, then, Say Anything seems to confirm many of the points Christopher Orr makes in his recent Atlantic piece about the dreadfulness of recent rom coms. Orr argues that romantic comedies these days are so bad because it's harder and harder to find a convincing "obstacle to nuptial bliss." Class, profession, race, parental disapproval—none of these, Orr says, are any longer realistic bars to happiness. Romance must have either serious dilemmas like illness—which ditches the comedy—or else hyperbolically ridiculous ones, which make for bad storytelling. Or (as an alternative Orr does not specifically address) it must keep the protagonists separate by turning one or the other or both into horrible people, which makes the ending repulsive rather than satisfying. (Does anyone think that Eddie Murphy's character getting the girl in Boomerang was a happy ending? Anyone?)

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But if Say Anything in part confirms Orr's thesis, it also calls it into question. It's certainly true that the '80s were a while ago, but has the ideology of true love actually changed all that much? Is it really more difficult now to imagine a protective father with an honor student daughter being leery of an intellectually and economically downmarket suitor? When I watched it recently, Say Anything didn't seem like a quaint relic of some past time when parents were nervous about their kids dating. Parents are still nervous about their kids dating, surely. If you could have a romantic comedy about that in 1989, you could have a romantic comedy about it now (albeit with more cell phones).

You could argue that Say Anything is only workable because its protagonists are young, and that romance for older people, at least, has become freer and less constrained. The available statistics, don't support that line of thinking, though. A 2010 study found that between 1967 and 2005 high-earning individuals in the US became more, not less, likely to marry other high earners, and low earners became more likely to marry low earners. A 2005 study found that the likelihood of individuals marrying someone with similar educational achievement increased between 1960 and 2003. The trend is similar in Britain (a sometimes source of rom coms). For those born in 1970, 45 percent married into the same class; for those born between 1976 and 1981, that number increased to 56 percent. When you add in growing income inequality generally, it seems clear that we've become less, not more, equal, and that dating patterns reflect that. It's true that barriers to interracial marriage are collapsing—but how many lasting rom coms about interracial dating outside of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner have been made anyways? If anything, you'd think that the lowering of the taboo would open the possibility for the movies to present interracial differences as humorous barriers to be overcome, rather than (a la Jungle Fever) as serious issues to be addressed in problem films.

In addition to the demographic data, there's another bit of evidence that undermines the thesis that society has rendered rom coms obsolete: rom coms themselves. Not Hollywood rom coms, but rom coms in other media. The long-running television mystery/rom-com Bones, for example, derives its frisson from the social and intellectual differences between its brainy anthropologist female lead and its regular-guy FBI agent male lead. Similarly, the Big Bang Theory's romantic tension is built around the intellectual/class differences between geeky physicist and middle American cocktail waitress—which doesn't seem all that different from the nerdy paleontologist/wealthy goofball pairing in Bringing Up Baby.

The main obstacle in Janet Evanovich's long-running Stephanie Plum mystery/rom-com series, on the other hand, is Plum herself, whose life, including its romantic aspects, is simply one big scattered mess. The main obstacle in Gail Carson Levine's delightful 1996 novel Ella, Enchanted is a curse of obedience on Ella which makes her a danger to her Prince—she needs to sort out her own issues, in other words, before she can love someone else. Orr says that outlandish plot twists like this are part of what's wrong with rom-coms these days—but Levine's novel, and the 2004 film based on it are both delightful. The fantasy is inventive, not decadent.

Premarital sex (and of course postmarital sex) has been pretty thoroughly validated in rom coms for a long time. Why should it suddenly be a narrative problem now?

Both the Stephanie Plum series and Ella Enchanted are built around internal barriers to romance. Alyssa Rosenberg argues that a focus on personal failings such as "indecision, self-doubt, and even arrested development" is the hallmark of the modern rom com in contrast to earlier versions. I'm not convinced, though. After all, the main barriers in Pride and Prejudice are, like the title says, pride and prejudice—Darcy's overweening self-regard and Elizabeth's stubborn insistence on sticking by her initial snap-judgment of his character. It's true that there's an errant aunt who opposes the match for class reasons, but mostly the problem is two protagonists determinedly getting in the way of their own happiness. As with Say Anything, there's no particular reason Jane Austen's rom coms couldn't work today—and, indeed, Clueless' updating of Emma was one of the rare entertaining rom coms of the '90s.

As Orr says, premarital sex in the 1990s was an option in a way that wasn't the case in Emma. But that didn't hurt Clueless, nor Say Anything. Both of these focused on young characters, admittedly, so sex was still a taboo and a tension. But what about Bull Durham? Or Annie Hall? Or Broadcast News? Or Moonstruck? The surprisingly not-awful Mr. and Mrs. Smith even featured a romantic couple who were already married. Yet all these films managed to survive—and even arguably to enjoy and use—the fact that they were able to show consenting adults consenting. Premarital sex (and of course postmarital sex) has been pretty thoroughly validated in rom coms for a long time. Why should it suddenly be a narrative problem now?

So if there has not been any sea change in love in the last 20 or 30 years, why are rom coms so lousy now? I don't have a single answer. Perhaps there hasn't been a falling off, and we're just remembering rom coms past (like the execrable Pretty Woman) through the haze of retrospective nostalgia. Perhaps Hollywood, in its eternal pursuit of the young male demographic, has just stopped being interested in more women-focused pictures. Perhaps it's just one of those genre phases, and in 10 years when we're tired of superheroes, rom-coms will make a comeback again. Perhaps it's a combination of all those factors. But I am sure of one thing. The rom com genre hasn't been destroyed by a national outflowing of tolerance and affection. If there are fewer decent rom coms, it's almost certainly because Hollywood has gotten worse, not because we've gotten better.

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Most of the big names in futurism are men. What does that mean for the direction we’re all headed?

In the future, everyone’s going to have a robot assistant. That’s the story, at least. And as part of that long-running narrative, Facebook just launched its virtual assistant. They’re calling it Moneypenny—the secretary from the James Bond Films. Which means the symbol of our march forward, once again, ends up being a nod back. In this case, Moneypenny is a send-up to an age when Bond’s womanizing was a symbol of manliness and many women were, no matter what they wanted to be doing, secretaries.

Why can’t people imagine a future without falling into the sexist past? Why does the road ahead keep leading us back to a place that looks like the Tomorrowland of the 1950s? Well, when it comes to Moneypenny, here’s a relevant datapoint: More than two thirds of Facebook employees are men. That’s a ratio reflected among another key group: futurists.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today.

— Deuteronomy 15: 12–15

Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation.

Even when they’re adopted, the children of the wealthy grow up to be just as well-off as their parents.

Lately, it seems that every new study about social mobility further corrodes the story Americans tell themselves about meritocracy; each one provides more evidence that comfortable lives are reserved for the winners of what sociologists call the birth lottery. But, recently, there have been suggestions that the birth lottery’s outcomes can be manipulated even after the fluttering ping-pong balls of inequality have been drawn.

What appears to matter—a lot—is environment, and that’s something that can be controlled. For example, one study out of Harvard found that moving poor families into better neighborhoods greatly increased the chances that children would escape poverty when they grew up.

While it’s well documentedthat the children of the wealthy tend to grow up to be wealthy, researchers are still at work on how and why that happens. Perhaps they grow up to be rich because they genetically inherit certain skills and preferences, such as a tendency to tuck away money into savings. Or perhaps it’s mostly because wealthier parents invest more in their children’s education and help them get well-paid jobs. Is it more nature, or more nurture?

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.